Team Trump's cabinet looks like a different kind of swamp

Washington: If Beijing is installed as the chief bogeyman in Donald Trump's imaginings, then it is perhaps fitting that the Chinese should claim ownership of that proverbial curse often parsed as a blessing: "May you live in interesting times."

As Americans and the world transition from the era of Barack Obama to that of Trump, they awake each day to a raft of "interesting" warnings and prognostications about their fate in the hands of the White House team being assembled by this President-elect.

There's a strong end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it whiff to this week's offerings – his foreign policy team wants war with Iran; he's delivering the US into Vladimir Putin's hands; and the oil and gas industry is amassing such inordinate power in Washington that a gang of climate change sceptics are set to trash the environment.

Trump's "wrecking ball and swamp creature" appointees are seen as delinquents and vandals; as foxes assigned to care for chickens, who are unfit for office – either through their past money-grubbing or their heretical outpourings against a litany of services and systems that, notionally at least, are the building blocks of a caring, inclusive and orderly society.

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President-elect Donald Trump has repopulated the swamp with a different breed of reptiles.Credit:AP

Steven Mnuchin is at Treasury – he's an investment banker who pocketed hundreds of millions in the housing crisis.

Andrew Puzder is at Labor – a fast-food CEO, his contempt for a decent minimum wage is matched only by the disdain for workers displayed in his claim that robots "never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case".

Billionaire Betsy DeVos is at Education – as a supporter of "school choice", her near-fanatical belief in charter schools and private instruction is read as a death knell for government-run schools.

Former Texas governor Rick Perry is at Energy – a department he once vowed to dismantle.

Rick Perry is the nominee for Energy Secretary, a department he once sought to dismantle.Credit:Bloomberg

Tom Price is at Health and Human Services – he wants to eviscerate Obamacare and cut the guts from of Medicare and Medicaid.

Elaine Chao is at Transport – she wants to rip the innards from regulations that govern big business, especially auto, aviation, railroad and pipeline safety.

Scott Pruitt is at the Environmental Protection Agency – he's a self-described "leading advocate" against the agency's very existence.

Alabama senator Jeff Sessions as attorney-general is an unambiguous two-fingered gesture to civil rights and immigration activists – Sessions is a strident opponent of the historic Civil Rights Act and of any immigration reform; he wants to strike down federal protection for LGBT victims of hate crimes; and in the Reagan years, he was memorably denied Senate confirmation for a judicial appointment because he was accused of racism.

Few of Trump's key appointees have any experience in government – the joke about his selection of Ben "God's Hands" Carson to run Housing and Urban Development is that Carson's only qualification for the gig is that he lives in a house.

But fear of what might be wrought by that lot pales when it comes to the generals in Trump's national security team – Mike Flynn as national security adviser, James Mattis as defence secretary and John Kelly as secretary of homeland security

And though he's been plucked from the ranks of Congress and not the military, Mike Pompeo, Trump's choice as director of the CIA, has the same dangerous world view.

Their collective commentary on crisis issues puts all of them at odds with Washington's broadly-bipartisan national security establishment, particularly when it comes to balancing mere irritants with consequential big-picture scenarios – think Taiwan and China; Israel and the Middle East; Cuba and Washington.

Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) presents ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson with a Russian medal at an award ceremony in 2012.Credit:AP

Whether it's North Korea and its nukes, China's muscle-flexing in the South China Sea, the Middle East meltdown or a border wall with Mexico, all are judged as extremists more likely to stoke than suppress Trump's predilection to abuse and confront any who dare to challenge him.

The seriously looney-tune card in the pack is Flynn, whose role as coordinator between the White House and myriad defence and intelligence services would regularly position him as the last to speak to an impressionable president before he acts.

Illustration: Richard Giliberto

Consider these nonsensical Flynn-isms and how they might inform Trump's Islamophobia:

"We are facing an alliance between Radical Islamists and … Havana, Pyongyang, Moscow and Beijing."

"The 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa – for which [Sunni] al-Qaeda took credit – were in large part [Shiite] Iranian operations."

"Islam is a political ideology … it definitely hides behind this notion of it being a religion … it's like a malignant cancer."

Equally disturbing is the possibility that John Bolton, a George W. Bush-era ambassador to the UN, might get a key post at the State Department. Bolton's disregard for facts and reasoned analysis is matched only by Trump's; and Bolton was a true believer in the wisdom of invading Iraq – yes, that's the war that Trump claims he didn't support, but which he did.

Just as George W arrived in office with a disdain for nation-building and a team fixated on Iraq, Trump, who campaigned as an isolationist, has assembled a team that is fixated on Iran – and while Bush went to war with his ears pinned back in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, there's no sense that the Trump mob has learnt from the huge and costly mistakes of Bush's foreign policy.

Americans have never seen a transition such as this – Bill Bennett, who served as education secretary under Ronald Reagan, rates Trump's cabinet selections as the most conservative ever. Team Trump is described variously as the "anti-cabinet", an "ungovernment" and the "anti-matter cabinet".

At the same time, there has never been such public hostility to Washington conventions and protocols and the perceived wisdom that insiders and experts know best. That was the essence of Trump's campaign and his stunning victory.

"To run the government, he has picked men and women who disdain the missions of their assigned agencies, oppose public goods, or conflate their own interests with that of the public," Jamelle Bouie writes in Slate magazine. "It's less a team for governing the country than a mechanism for dismantling its key institutions."

The perennial third-party presidential candidate and consumer advocate Ralph Nader is derisory: "A bizarre selection of men and women marinated either in corporatism or militarism, with strains of racism, class cruelty and ideological rigidity."

Indeed, even some Republicans are holding their noses – particularly over ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson's nomination as secretary of state, because of his and some of the other appointees' ties to Moscow.

But a small army of GOP luminaries are cheering Tillerson's nomination – Robert Gates, Condoleezza Rice, James Baker, Dick Cheney and Stephen Hadley.

The conservative commentariat insists all the foreboding is needlessly alarmist. There's an element of truth in their "well they would say that" rejection of partisan critics like Bouie. But at this stage of proceedings, all that the Trump team can be judged on is a well-documented record of how its members have conducted themselves.

High-profile Republican consultant Whit Ayres was a bit disingenuous in defending the Trump picks in these terms: "From the point of view of liberals [ie. Democrats], most of the appointments are abhorrent, but in many ways the appointments so far could very well have been named by a president Jeb Bush or president Marco Rubio. This is not for the most part revolutionary."

GOP consultant Ron Bonjean perhaps was closer to the mark in observing: "It's a reflection of what Donald Trump has been wanting to do, which is to take the establishment and shake it upside down – it's as if these Cabinet secretaries are each moving into a house … completely demolishing it, turning it upside down and remodelling it the way they want to see it."

The team is mostly wealthy – dominated by billionaires and multi-millionaires. By one calculation, the combined wealth of Trump's 17 picks to date, more than $US9.5 billion ($12.67 billion), is greater than the combined wealth of the 43 million least wealthy households in the country - about one-third of all American households.

The team is mostly white, male and oldish. Only four women have been named to date, compared with seven in the first Obama cabinet. And along with Carson, two of the women double as the only representatives of American diversity.

Congress will give some of Trump's appointees a rough confirmation ride, particularly because in true Trump fashion, his transition team's vetting of would-be nominees reportedly has been based more on a "lick and a promise" than a thoroughgoing effort to uncover the kind of financial or other embarrassments that angry Democrats and a few wary Republicans might use against them.

But over the years, not many presidential nominees have been rejected.

The greater challenge for these outsiders will be to effectively harness their sprawling, unwieldy bureaucracies – as The Washington Post's Karen Tumulty put it: "The question is whether those who promise to bring a corporate mindset to governance will change the system or be run over by it."

Jeffrey Lord, writing in Conservative Review, warns of open war between the Trump appointees and professional bureaucrats: "Which means when Cabinet appointee X decides to pursue Trump policy Y, there will be the guaranteed internal response that he or she cannot do Y because it has always been done in another, decidedly liberal, fashion.

"Trump has mounted a serious challenge to the American Left. He has pushed back against its arrogant presumption that these bureaucracies are the rightful possession of leftist bureaucrats who are the footsoldiers of, among others, environmental fanatics, politicised lawyers, and regulation-crazed ideologues."

Ken Duberstein, who was Ronald Reagan's White House chief of staff, thinks this power handover will be different. "The working assumption is that every cabinet officer gets captured by his bureaucracy within a year, a year and a half. Not these people," he told The Washington Post.

Under any other president, the Whit Ayres claim that any of Trump's appointees could have been picked to serve in a Rubio or Jeb Bush cabinet might be true, but the big difference this time around is that in this administration the ultimate decision-maker will be Trump, whose temperament for office is questionable and who has gathered moneyed Wall Street veterans, industrialists and the super-rich into an administration that seems more a Russian oligarchy than a liberal, Western government.

Despite uncertainty during the campaign as to where Trump would position himself on the political spectrum, it can be concluded from his appointments that as president he'll be very conservative – "a Ted Cruz who tweets", as one DC observer had it.

But the style and manner of his presidency is likely to be like none before him. Trump is not the kind of individual who is happy to defer to the likes of Congress or even the Supreme Court.

Writing in TheDaily Beast, William Duggan postulates that Americans will get to see Trump's inner tyrant: "He saw in Putin of Russia a fellow tyrant worthy of his respect. Now as president, Trump retains his disdain for the norms and procedures of our democratic system.

"Why should he conform to it? He ran against it, and won. He is appointing anti-government officials and authoritarian figures – military generals and business tycoons. He will aim to bypass Congress and rule by executive fiat wherever he can."

Trump comes to the presidency as his own man. He ran against both major parties – and won.

He defied all the conventions of modern campaigning – and won.

Weaponising social media, he told the mainstream media to take a hike – and he won.

At a time when virtually all American institutions, save for the military, have lost the trust of Americans, Trump was alone among more than 20 would-be nominees in both major parties in winning that trust.

He'll come to every policy decision with a realtor's transactional mindset. And despite his contempt for the mainstream media, he knows how to play the media – note that in bribing Carrier to keep up to a thousand jobs in Indiana, rather than relocate them to Mexico, Trump probably got more public acknowledgement than Obama did for saving the entire US economy in his first years in office.

The events of 2016 have given us a remarkable insight into how the Trump years might unfold.

The swamp has not been drained – it has just been populated with a different breed of reptiles. The new president's world view is based on his sense of where he can build hotels. And of all the leaders in the world, it is Putin that is Trump's most likely role model.

The President-elect is a serial liar and his millions of supporters believe him. He owns the GOP – senior Republicans remain silent or obfuscate rather than dare to challenge the nonsense he utters, like his claim that millions of illegal voters robbed him of the popular vote.

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In the midst of all this, theirs is a huge Trump gamble – that the sheer force of his willpower and the gang he's bringing to Washington will ignite a clash of cultures that will fix Washington and the world … and that he's the man to control it all.